Apparently DC is imposing a charge for plastic bags, just like the one here in Toronto.

I think one of the key positive things the tax has accomplished is making it socially acceptable to bring your own bags to the grocery store. The canvas bags now used by most people (and sold by most grocery stores) are far superior to plastic bags. I can carry in two bags what previously would have needed eight. And I don’t have to worry that one of those bags will have its bottom fall out the first time I decide to rush across a busy intersection.

Without making it an everybody thing, it’s awkward to say “Oh, don’t worry, I carry my own bags.” Because people who carry their bags are, you know, bag people.

Apparently Walmart is trying to do some good to reduce the material used in overpackaged products.

I actually do own something to make opening packages easier, and I haven’t bled since buying it.

I’m guessing this is less a case of a Walmart board meeting with the agenda “How can we help the environment?” and more the case of a Walmart board meeting with the agenda “What are we already trying to do that happens to help the environment?”

Walmart ships bazillions of cubic whatevers of goods around. If they can cut down on the size of the packaging, they can ship more product in less space.

I’m not saying it’s not good, I’m just saying let’s not kid ourselves about their motivations.

Felix Salmon considers a post by Alice Schroeder.

Felix says

Schroeder explains that being universally liked is a major source of Buffett’s wealth: it makes it a lot easier for him to acquire any given business. Absent Buffett, it’s going be much harder for Berkshire to acquire the privately-held companies that it specializes in buying. And more generally, it’s going to be a practical impossibility for Berkshire to be run by someone as teflon-coated as Buffett. Could anybody else fire 3,000 Salvadorean textile workers and receive essentially no bad press at all?

The thing is, Buffett doesn’t fire people. The reason he’s so well-liked is he buys companies, but he doesn’t run them. I highly doubt the order came down from him to fire anybody. Buffett isn’t universally liked just because, as Schroeder says, “Buffett has gone to a lot of trouble to be universally liked.” He’s liked because when he takes over a company he lets that company keep running. He doesn’t say “fire 3000 people.” He says “run things the way you’ve been running things.” And sometimes running a business means letting people go.

I’d agree that to a greater than usual degree the success of a giant conglomerate rests on a single person, and there may be problems with their seemingly basic corporate model once Buffett and Munger are gone. But Buffett’s been saying for years that their size alone would make it very difficult to provide significant returns. It’s that kind of honesty that makes him so liked.

Apple shouldn’t always win so easily.

It’s generally not a very useful question to ask a single day of stock market trading to confirm your suspicions.

A single day of stock trading doesn’t represent much more than the random noise of morons. Yes, health insurance stocks generally went up relative to the general market much more than you would otherwise expect. Yes, that probably reflects some generally held belief about the impact of legislation on these companies’ bottom lines. First, “generally held” and “correct” are two very different things. Second, what’s good for private insurers isn’t necessarily bad for those being insured.

Nate Silver (via Yglesias) determines, “This would mean that the total value added from passage of the bill is $16.04 billion.” That’s market cap increases of publicly traded and privately held private insurance companies.

I was thinking this isn’t spelled out properly, but it is in Silver’s original post. In it, he notes that the numbers probably imply that “the increase in share prices today reflects an expectation of higher volumes — but probably not higher profit margins, which are likely to remain fairly low in the industry.”

And the main thing to note is that it’s all about discounted cashflows. Silver does: “The bottom line is that, by the stock market’s estimation, the private health care industry appears as though it will benefit if the Senate enacts its plan. But the benefit — about $16 billion in discounted cashflows — is small as compared to the total magnitude of the program, and likely reflects an increase in the size of their customer base rather than any anticipation of higher profit margins.”

But I think the $16 billion comparison to the $447 billion subsidy (over a ten year timeframe?) isn’t quite the correct comparison. $16 billion should be compared to the present value of the subsidies over forever, appropriately discounted.

Bankers have been irresponsible, and in Canada even sort of admit it.

But there’s this:

In 2005, provincial securities regulators opened the exempt market to smaller players as long as the securities had earned approval from a debt-rating agency. After that decision, the market for those types of securities ballooned from $10 billion to over $30 billion as poorly informed investors bought into the market.

If you give the prisoners knives, the prisoners aren’t the only ones culpable in the bloodshed.

James Kwak worries about the government’s/GM’s apparent interest in finding a “world-class CEO.”

He notes that believing a superstar CEO can turn around a bad company is delusional.

Another common delusion is believing that a superstar CEO can turn around a bad company. “The basic issue is that the chances that one person will be able to transform a company of one hundred thousand people are pretty low.” Of course.

The thing is, this shouldn’t be surprising since people are idiots. Even in the regular job market you run into a problem where it’s hard to get a job if you haven’t already done that job.

People have a tendency to assume that just because someone did something (even if not especially well), they are the right candidate to keep on doing it. Even though there’s not really any basis for that.

Those aren’t the best examples, but I couldn’t help it.

The point is, people love the status quo. “What’s that? You ran a company into the ground? You must have a lot of valuable experience.”

That the world turns at all is sometimes amazing.

I don’t know if this is a typo when Digby says, regarding U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, that “He is one of the only people I can see who wouldn’t divide the Republicans and could possibly bring in right leaning Independents. (They love the commanding CE0/General types.)”

In case it’s not showing up in whatever font I’m using here, that’s a zero at the end of “CE0.”

It may be important that anger legitimately directed towards certain banking CE0’s doesn’t feed a generally indiscriminate populist outrage at business leaders in general (surely, somewhere, there are some decent business people), but for certain executives the designation feels pretty appropriate.

What would be strange behaviour in real life can be perfectly acceptable behaviour in the business world. Still, my instinct when I first read this was that Microsoft will just never learn:

Microsoft is offering different terms to different publishers as it seeks to boost Bing by paying some content owners to cut their sites off from Google’s rival search engine, industry executives said on Monday.

(I assume that’s wrong and Microsoft isn’t saying “Here’s cash to not use Google,” but “Here’s cash to use us instead.”)

But upon further reflection…

I use Google, though I don’t like to, because no single entity should know so much about me. I tried Bing, and it was pretty good but not quite as good, so I went back to Google. If Google stopped indexing sites belonging to News Corp. (which is a huge list all in), I imagine that wouldn’t mean too much to me given the incredible redundancy of online information, though maybe at some points I’d get annoyed when I want to hear a song quickly and type “[insert super cool band here] myspace” only to find no results. But add a few more information conglomerates along with some smaller interests, and that might be enough to increase those annoyance points to a degree where I’d sometimes search elsewhere.

Beyond the feasibility of the mechanics of this whole enterprise (if I have a website that has a link to myspace, would Google be removing that link from their cached pages, or prohibit them from showing up in their search result summaries?), this can’t be good for consumers. If I have access to two different stores that both have access to the exact same inventory, the only way they can compete is by doing a better job of providing me access to that inventory (cheaper, faster, better service, etc.). If every store made of brick could all fit every single product inside it, I could do all of my shopping at just one store. The best store. If they can’t, I have to run all over the place.

Beyond how Microsoft seems to be trying to make money by screwing everybody (which is fine, I guess), this also feels like Microsoft testing the water a bit. Their antitrust situations are probably taking up less time than ever, they haven’t tried buying Intuit lately, their OS (very slightly) and browser dominance (more significantly) are decreasing, but they still accumulate cash faster than they know what to do with it and have monopoly-like earnings power (as does Google).

I can’t imagine this is what the future landscape of search looks like, but I can imagine that it’s a temporary interruption created by a small-ish player with incredible resources, designed to blow things up so that when the smoke clears they come out on top.